LUMPENPROLETARIAT—For many years now, easily one of the most courageous journalists in the USA, has been Jeremy Scahill. [1] He is a brilliant example of honest journalism for all those engaged in, but shirking the moral obligations of, the only profession protected by the U.S. Constitution—journalism.

Today, Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept have published a new important book, and a must-read for all, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program. Naturally, Scahill has joined his early mentors at Democracy Now! to discuss the publication of his latest book, alongside another of our favourite journalists, Dr. Glenn Greenwald. Dr. Greenwald wrote the afterword. And national hero, whistleblower, and political exile, Edward Snowden has written the foreword. Scahill will be in the San Francisco Bay Area next week on his book tour; Lumpenproletariat will be covering that event and reporting back to our readers. Listen to (or download) today’s interview with Jeremy Scahill joined by Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now!here. [2]

Messina

***

DEMOCRACY NOW!—[3 MAY 2016] “I may not be here if it wasn’t for Dan Berrigan,” says journalist Jeremy Scahill as we remember the legendary antiwar priest, Father Daniel Berrigan, who spent his lifetime nonviolently protesting militarism, nuclear proliferation, racism and poverty. Berrigan died Saturday in the Bronx, just short of his 95th birthday. Scahill was a college student when he first met Berrigan, and went on to become close friends with him and his brother, Philip. The conversations they had inspired him to pursue fiercely independent journalism. “This man was just a moral giant,” Scahill says, “the closest thing we have in our society to a prophet.”

This is a rush transcript [by Democracy Now!]. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re on the road in our 100-city tour in Sarasota, Florida, headed to Atlanta, Georgia, tonight. But today we’re spending the hour with The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, looking at the stunning new book, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program.

But first, Jeremy, I want to ask you about the death of Father Dan Berrigan, who died Saturday at the age of 94. Along with his late brother Phil, Dan Berrigan played an instrumental role in inspiring the antiwar and antidraft movement during the late ’60s, as well as the movement against nuclear weapons. Jeremy, you were a dear friend of Dan and Phil Berrigan’s. Can you talk about the significance of the life of Dan Berrigan, and just tell us who he was and what he meant to you?

JEREMYSCAHILL: Well, Amy, I would say that, you know, I actually may not be here if it wasn’t for Dan Berrigan. My dad—both of my parents are nurses. And my dad grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and he was going to be a seminarian. And, you know, his parents were Irish immigrants, very Catholic family. He was the only boy in the family. It seemed like a sort of fait accompli that he was going to have to be a priest. And he went to school, and he studied theology. And then, in the mid-1960s, there was the emergence of what was known in the United States as the Catholic left—people like Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement; Thomas Merton, who—the brilliant Trappist monk, who was one of the early intellectual voices against the war in Vietnam; and then these two rebel priests, Father Daniel Berrigan and Father Philip Berrigan. And Dan Berrigan had given a talk that my dad went to, and it deeply impacted my father, and he basically left home and moved to New York to the Catholic Worker house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And it forever altered who our family was and the sort of moral code that we were taught as children.

I mean, I grew up knowing of the Catonsville Nine, Philip and Dan Berrigan and seven of their friends going into the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, in May of 1968 and taking hundreds of draft files that were being used to draft primarily African Americans in that area into the war in Vietnam. Of course, black Americans were deployed disproportionately to Vietnam along with the poor. And Phil Berrigan had been a civil rights priest, a member of the Josephite order, and had participated in the Freedom Rides in the South. Dan Berrigan was already a fairly famous literary figure. He had won a major poetry prize for his first book of poetry. And for these two priests, in their full religious garb, to have led this kind of a protest and then burn these draft files with homemade napalm reverberated around the world, and it energized a movement of young Catholics and people of faith to become very, very political about the war in Vietnam. And it also inspired a series of actions similar to Catonsville in Camden, in Milwaukee, around the country, where people, saying that they were motivated by their religious faith, going into draft boards and burning draft cards or pouring blood on draft cards. So I grew up in a household where Daniel Berrigan and Dorothy Day and Phil Berrigan and the late, great Dave Dellinger, legendary peace activist, one of the Chicago Eight in the conspiracy trial stemming from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968—

And so—but I didn’t meet Dan Berrigan because of that. I was in school at the University of Wisconsin, where I was—well, I would just say that I was enrolled in school; I wouldn’t necessarily say that I was participating in school. But I was doing work with people who were homeless, and I decided I didn’t want to be at the university anymore, and I hitchhiked out to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1995. And at that—and I had no idea that the entire peace movement was descending on D.C. that summer to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I remember seeing all of these people that I had been told about during my childhood were the real heroes of our society and whose books lined my father’s bookshelf in our small apartment that we lived in as little kids. And one day, I—Dan Berrigan came. And he was outside of the Pentagon, just standing like anyone else. And to me, you know, it would be like seeing LeBron James, you know, for some kids today, where it was like, “Oh, my god! This is Father Daniel Berrigan!”

And anyway, I went up and introduced myself to him. And we were standing around, and Liz McAlister, who, of course, is an amazing activist and just an incredible, wonderful person, who also was Phil Berrigan’s partner and of course one of Dan Berrigan’s closest people ever to him, she—I think she realized that I was a little bit awestruck by being around Dan Berrigan, and she said, “Hey, kid, would you mind escorting Father Berrigan to go and use the bathroom?” And this is pre-9/11, so, you know, I’m like, “Wow! I get to walk Dan Berrigan to a bathroom!” And I didn’t know it, but we—it was pre-9/11: We could actually go into the Pentagon. So I walked into the Pentagon with Father Daniel Berrigan, who had served time in federal prison for burning the draft files they had used to send so many people to the war in Vietnam. And when we walked in, as uniformed members of the military were walking out, they greeted Dan Berrigan as though he was like a—you know, a cousin that they see from time to time at family reunions, because he had spent so much time protesting there. And then, we go into the Pentagon, and we’re in the bathroom, you know, using their facilities. And Dan says to me as we’re standing there, “You know, in the 1940s, when Roosevelt authorized the building of this place, there was talk of it being converted to a hospital when the war was over.” And then he sort of pauses, and he says, “And, you know, in a way, they kept their word. It’s the largest insane asylum in the world.”

And that started my relationship with Dan and Phil Berrigan, and I ended up living with Phil Berrigan, painting houses for the better part of a year and a half. And really, it was like having an alternative education. I always say that I—you know, I list as my university, on social media, Democracy Now! And I would say that the combination of—Amy, of hearing you for the first time on the radio and discovering this whole world of Pacifica and community media, and then having daily conversations with people like Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister and Daniel Berrigan, really shaped who I wanted to be. And, you know, I put a picture up on Twitter, Amy, of you sitting with Dan Berrigan when my book Dirty Wars came out, and I was just saying that, you know, without these two, meaning you and Daniel Berrigan, I would not be who I am today and not be about what I’m about today.

And, you know, I don’t think we were shocked by the death of Dan. I mean, he was almost 95 years old. He was in very frail physical condition. But this man was just a moral giant and the closest thing we have in our society to a prophet. And last night I was watching one of the networks. The only real coverage, outside of Democracy Now!‘s beautiful show on Dan Berrigan, was on Chris Hayes’s show on MSNBC, and Chris Hayes played a clip of Chris Wallace, who’s now of course the Fox News Sunday host and son of the legendary 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace. And it was in 1981, and Chris Wallace says to Dan Berrigan, basically, “Well, you used to be famous, but nobody really pays much attention to what you do these days.” Meanwhile, a year earlier, they had—Dan and his colleagues had gone into this nuclear plant at the General Electric factory in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and hammered on Mark 12A warheads, starting the Plowshares Movement, which became global. But Dan’s response to Chris Wallace was just classic Dan Berrigan and also just sort of stunning in its simple brilliance. He said, “Well, you know, we don’t view our conscience as being tethered to the other end of a television cord.” And I thought that it was just—you know, it was such a commentary on the dingbat factory in Washington versus someone whose entire life was about not just saying something, like so many of these pundits do, but standing there. And, you know, I always loved what Dan Berrigan wrote about Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, when she died. He said that Dorothy Day lived as though the truth were actually true. So, too, to Dan.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, Jeremy, I thank you for introducing me to the Berrigans, Phil Berrigan, before he died, and Dan Berrigan. And it was really coming full circle when my colleague and co-author Denis Moynihan and I went up to Fordham to visit Dan a few years ago, to be able to bring him your latest book, Dirty Wars. Now, I want to go to an—oh, we also brought him one other thing: ice cream. His favorite food, ice cream. But—

JEREMYSCAHILL: Amy, can I tell you one thing about Dan Berrigan and ice cream that not that many people know? First of all, Dan Berrigan loved ice cream, and his fridge was always stocked with ice cream. But he loved ice cream so much that it caught the attention of Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont ice cream company, manufacturer. And they—you know, they contribute to a lot of progressive causes. And Dan Berrigan and the Black Panther, Bobby Seale, and Michelle Shocked and Pete Seeger and Spike Lee all appeared in a Ben & Jerry’s ad. And I think Dan’s was like mocha chocolate fudge, and he’s holding it up as though it’s sort of like a Eucharist, you know, the communion at church.

But Dan was given, by Ben & Jerry’s, a lifetime supply of the ice cream, for any—so any event the Catholic Worker would have that Dan was involved with, Dan would make sure that like, you know, a massive like crate of Ben & Jerry’s was delivered. He always had it in his freezer. And if he would walk into an ice cream shop somewhere and they had Ben & Jerry’s, he would tell them that he was Dan Berrigan and he has a right to as much ice cream and ice cream for his friends. And so, I also think that it was allowed to be transferred to some of his family members. Frida Berrigan, Dan’s niece, who you had on the show yesterday, who’s a dear old friend of mine, she and I once went into a—we were outside of a trial that was going on for some antinuclear activists, and we went into a Ben & Jerry’s shop. And Frida said—looked at the poster of Dan, was up on the wall there, and she said, “That’s my uncle, and I demand my free ice cream.” And they actually—they said, “Really, you’re Dan Berrigan’s niece?” She said, “Yes.” They said, “What do you want?”

AMYGOODMAN: And they had a flavor named after him, right?

JEREMYSCAHILL: Right, Raspberrigan, yeah. No, it’s—he loved life. He loved ice cream. And the thing that—you know, sometimes when we—we look at the clips of Dan Berrigan, that are now increasingly circulating around online, and I encourage young people to look at them, but what you often don’t hear about these sort of incredible giants of our time, you know, Dan Berrigan, the—probably, you know, along with Pope Francis, the most famous Jesuit in modern history, and certainly the Jesuit who has had the most impact around the world in terms of confronting war and confronting the church’s complicity in making war, but you don’t necessarily know that these—Dan Berrigan was a hilarious person. He was warm. He was funny. And he loved to gather among friends and have a little whiskey, and occasionally he would smoke a cigarette out the window of the—you know, of his apartment. And his home was just lined with posters and art from all of these people who Dan had walked the Earth alongside in his struggles. Even his bathroom was just wall to wall with photos of images of protest and resistance. And, you know, I’ll just—I’ll never forget the feeling that people who had the honor of being around Dan would get just by hearing his infectious laugh. Both he and Phil would—were capable of laughing to the point of tears. And to see these guys, who were such militant confronters of the U.S. empire, also enjoying just the existence on this planet and the people around them is really what I’ll never forget.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I wanted to end with an excerpt of Dan Berrigan. He was interviewed on NBC’s Today Show back in 1981. Again, this was him being interviewed by Chris Wallace.

CHRISWALLACE: Back in the Vietnam days, the Berrigan brothers were big. You attracted tens of thousands of people. Now you’re not as big. You do not attract the same attention.

FATHERDANIELBERRIGAN: Mm-hmm.

CHRISWALLACE: Is that hard for you?

FATHERDANIELBERRIGAN: No, I don’t think we ever felt our conscience was tied to the other end of a TV cord. I think we’ve tried for a number of years to do what was right, because it was right.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Father Dan Berrigan on The Today Show in 1981. His funeral will be held on Friday in New York City at 10:00 a.m. at the Church of St. Francis Xavier on West 16th Street in New York. A wake will be held Thursday night. You can visit democracynow.org for our full coverage of the life and death of Dan Berrigan. When we come back, The Intercept‘s Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald on The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” by Paul Simon. The line about a radical priest is, yes, a reference to Father Dan Berrigan.”

*

As the Obama administration prepares to release for the first time the number of people it believes it has killed in drone strikes in countries that lie outside of conventional war zones, we look at a new book out today that paints a very different picture of the U.S. drone program. “The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program” is written by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, and based on leaked government documents provided by a whistleblower. The documents undermine government claims that drone strikes have been precise. Part of the book looks at a program called Operation Haymaker in northeastern Afghanistan. During one five-month period, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The book is based on articles published by The Intercept last year. It also includes new contributions from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and The Intercept’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. We speak with Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald.

This is a rush transcript [by Democracy Now!]. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re on the road in Sarasota, Florida. I’ll be speaking in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight. But here in Sarasota, we’re less than an hour from Tampa, which houses the United States Special Operations Command. It’s the epicenter of planning for the global targeted killing program and other covert military action. Well, we turn now to look at President Obama and drones. On Saturday night, Comedy Central’s Larry Wilmore criticized Obama’s reliance on drone warfare during his remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. He compared Obama’s foreign policy to that of reigning NBAMVP Steph Curry.

LARRYWILMORE: It looks like you’re really enjoying your last year of the presidency. Saw you hanging out with NBA players like Steph Curry, Golden State Warriors. That was cool. That was cool, yeah. You know, it kind of makes sense, too, because both of you like raining down bombs on people from long distances, right? Yeah, sure. What? Am I wrong?

AMYGOODMAN: Larry Wilmore’s comments come as the Obama administration prepares to release for the first time the number of people it believes it’s killed in drone strikes in countries that lie outside of conventional war zones. Speaking last month in Chicago, President Obama addressed the issue of civilian deaths in drone strikes.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: There’s no doubt that some innocent people have been killed by drone strikes. It is not true that it has been this sort of willy-nilly, you know, “Let’s bomb a village.” That is not how it’s—folks have operated. And what I can say with great certainty is that the rate of civilian casualties in any drone operation are far lower than the rate of civilian casualties that occur in conventional war.

AMYGOODMAN: A new book being published today paints a very different picture of the U.S. drone program. It’s titled The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program. It’s written by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, based on leaked government documents provided by a whistleblower. The documents undermine government claims that drone strikes have been precise. Part of the book looks at a program called Operation Haymaker in northeastern Afghanistan. During one five-month period, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The book is based on articles published by The Intercept last year. It also includes new contributions from NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden and The Intercept‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. Snowden’s introduction to the book has just been published on The Intercept’s website.

Joining us now, still with us, Jeremy Scahill, and Glenn Greenwald is joining us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They founded The Intercept with Laura Poitras. Jeremy, let’s go back to you. Lay out the scope of The Assassination Complex, especially now as President Obama is about to reveal at least what the government is willing to admit are the number of people killed in drone strikes.

JEREMYSCAHILL: Right, well, Amy, you know, the covert drone program, for the majority of its lifespan, has been shrouded in secrecy, and it was sort of a kind of macabre joke in Washington, because the entire world could see that the U.S. was raining bombs down on people across the globe and in an increasing number of countries in the early stages of Obama’s presidency, and yet the United States would never officially confirm that it had conducted a drone strike. And instead, you would see President Obama making jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner about how he was going to conduct a drone strike against the Jonas Brothers if they came near his daughters, and everybody yucks it up and laughs in Washington about it. He then answered a question on a Google Plus hangout, but never gave a substantive policy speech on the use of drones, really, until 2013.

And what the Obama administration is doing right now is basically trying to rebrand and engage in historical revisionism about what is going to be one of the most deadly legacies of the Obama era, and that is that somehow they came up with a cleaner way of waging war. I would say that the most significant aspect of what President Obama has done, regarding drones and regarding the so-called targeted killing program around the world, is that Obama has codified assassination as a central official component of American foreign policy. And he has implemented policies that a Republican probably would not have been able to implement, certainly not with the support that Obama has received from so many self-identified liberals. It will be very interesting to see, if a Republican wins, how many of the MSNBC pundits and other, you know, so-called liberals—what their position will be on these very same policies.

But the fact is that the White House—we understand the White House is going to be releasing statistics, that some indicate are going to say that upwards of 60 people—six-zero people—have been killed in drone strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is a—it’s a horrifying piece of propaganda, if that is—if that’s true. The reason that the Obama administration and that the president can say to the American people, “Well, we’ve only killed a small number of civilians,” is because—and our documents in the book show this—because they have embraced a system of counting the dead which almost always will result in zero civilians killed, because anyone who is killed in a drone strike, under this administration, is labeled as an enemy killed in action, an EKIA, until or unless posthumously proven to have not been a militant, a terrorist, what have you. This is a global assassination program that is authorized and run under what amounts to a parallel legal system or judicial system where the president and his advisers serve as the judge, jury and executioner of people across the globe. And so, the documents that we obtained will give lie to the proclamations that this somehow is a saner, less deadly form of warfare when it comes to impacting civilians.

And the final thing, Amy, that I would say is that I think what you really see come through in the military’s own assessments, that we’re publishing in this book, of the drone program is that the U.S. is creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Rather than stopping terrorism, the U.S., through its drone program, is encouraging terrorism and providing terrorist organization with recruitment material, just as the Guantánamo prison serves as recruitment material for the people that the Obama administration claims it’s trying stop from conducting acts of terrorism.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s Jeremy Scahill. We’re also joined by Glenn Greenwald. He’s in Rio de Janeiro, and I’m in Sarasota, Florida, right near SOCOM, the Special Operations Command. In the afterword, Glenn, of The Assassination Complex, you say that most of the revelations in the book, quote, “signify one of the most enduring and consequential aspects of the Obama legacy: the continuation of endless war.” Can you expand on this?

GLENNGREENWALD: It seems like a really distant memory now, but if you look back to what President Obama, then-Senator Obama, was saying in 2006, 2007, as his critique of the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism, he was essentially railing against not just the policies, but the mindset and the approach that, once he became president, he ended up not only embracing, but strengthening and increasing. He talked all the time about how terrible it was to treat somebody like a terrorist and punish them with imprisonment in Guantánamo, with indefinite detention, without so much as giving them the right to have a trial. And not only has he continued the system of indefinite detention—and he intended to continue the system of indefinite detention, even if he were able to close Guantánamo; his plan was simply to shift it to American soil—he’s done much more than that. He has institutionalized a program where now we don’t only just imprison people without any charges or due process, we don’t just eavesdrop on them, which was one of his big critiques of the Bush administration, without first giving them due process or a trial, we now just target them for execution, for death, for a death penalty.

You know, for a long time, a staple of Democratic ideology has been that the death penalty is wrong, even with a full trial and appeals and due process and lawyers and all of the constitutional rights that are afforded to criminal defendants. And yet President Obama has embraced a policy that says that he can literally go around the world, target people for death anywhere in the world that he wants, including places where we’re not at war, including even American citizens, and simply eradicate their lives based on his order—not in a war zone, people who are not engaged in combat at the time they’re killed. They’re killed in cars, in their houses, while they’re working, driving with their children, at funerals, rescuing people. Wherever it is that they might be found, they can simply be killed.

And the most extraordinary aspect about it is that Democratic partisans, who were cheering his critiques in 2006 and 2007 and pretending to oppose this approach because it was a Republican who did it, switched completely on a dime. And the minute that President Obama embraced these policies, they, as public opinion polls show, completely switched how they think about all of these policies and started supporting them. And what this has meant is that these policies have shifted from being just a right-wing, extremist, Republican framework into one that is fully bipartisan, and therefore will be institutionalized and has been strengthened for years, if not decades, to come, in a way that George Bush and Dick Cheney could only have dreamed of.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to a clip from National Bird, a new documentary on drone warfare that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last month. This is Lisa Ling, a former drone system technical sergeant.

LISALING: This is global. This is getting information anywhere at any time, shooting people from anywhere at any time. And it’s not just one person sitting there with a little remote control, a little joystick, moving around a plane that’s halfway across the world. That’s not all there is. It’s like borders don’t matter anymore. And there’s a huge system that spans the globe, that can just suck up endless amounts of your life, your personal data. I mean, this could grow to get so out of control. And we’re not the only ones that have this. This is going to be commonplace, if it’s not already. It’s a secret program. And what that means is that I can’t just go shouting off the hilltops telling the public what it is. What I can tell you is that, to me, one person who worked within this massive thing, it’s frightening.

AMYGOODMAN: “Drone whistleblower Lisa Ling, in the documentary National Bird.”

*

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote the foreword for the new book by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, “The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program,” which is based on leaked government documents provided by a whistleblower. Snowden writes, “These disclosures about the Obama administration’s killing program reveal that there’s a part of the American character that is deeply concerned with the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of power. And there is no greater or clearer manifestation of unchecked power than assuming for oneself the authority to execute an individual outside of a battlefield context and without the involvement of any sort of judicial process.” We speak with Scahill, who says the Obama administration has targeted Snowden for being a whistleblower, while allowing others to leak information that benefits it.

This is a rush transcript [by Democracy Now!]. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, another whistleblower, Edward Snowden, who wrote the foreword for The Assassination Complex, Snowden writes, quote, “These disclosures about the Obama administration’s killing program reveal that there’s a part of the American character that is deeply concerned with the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of power. And there is no greater or clearer manifestation of unchecked power than assuming for oneself the authority to execute an individual outside of a battlefield context and without the involvement of any sort of judicial process.” That’s Edward Snowden. Jeremy Scahill, take it from there.

JEREMYSCAHILL: Well, you know, and one of the things that Ed Snowden also addresses, and this—by the way, this is a very substantive essay that Ed Snowden wrote, that is both personal and political in nature. And he writes about how there’s a difference between whistleblowing and leaking. And he talks about the difference between the authorized leaks in Washington and the sharing of classified information with mistresses, as David Petraeus did, and then people like Daniel Ellsberg or Chelsea Manning and others. And Snowden says that, you know, it’s an act of political resistance when you are engaged in that kind of whistleblowing, and, of course, states what now has become painfully obvious, that the Obama administration is engaged in a war, not against leakers, but against whistleblowers.

There was just these—the CIA was live-tweeting, you know, their version of what happened in the compound in Abbottobad, Pakistan, the night that Osama bin Laden was killed. And, you know, the Central Intelligence Agency was basically a sieve in the immediate aftermath of that operation. But more, the political people in the White House, the people that were closest to President Obama, were deliberately feeding journalists and media a completely false narrative about what took place in that raid. And none of them were held accountable for—or even viewed as having done something wrong by releasing all of the information that turned out to be false that they did, about a firefight happening, about bin Laden putting one of his wives in front of him. I mean, almost everything that John Brennan and his buddies said in the immediate aftermath, because they were rushing to plant the flag of victory on Osama bin Laden’s dead corpse, turned out to be propaganda or just wrong.

And so, when you have people of courage who leak, who provide documents, classified documents, of the nature that Edward Snowden did to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, that the source for The Assassination Complex book did in providing these documents to us, these are people motivated by conscience who understand that their lives will never be the same as a result of what they’ve done. They are not people like Sandy Berger, who can go in and stuff classified documents down his pants and then walk away from it. They’re not David Petraeus, who gets a slap on the hand. These are people that know that they are going to be in the target sights of the most powerful institution in world history. And that is the U.S. empire.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. We’re talking to Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept co-founder with Glenn Greenwald, who is also with us, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The book is The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program. It’s out today. Stay with us.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: “Homenagem ao Malandro,” “A Tribute to the Trickster,” by Leny Andrade, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re on the road in Sarasota, Florida. But in New York, Jeremy Scahill is with us; in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Glenn Greenwald. The new book by The Intercept, led by Jeremy Scahill, this book titled The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program, you talk about the—you say at the beginning of the book, Jeremy, that “Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination.” Talk about the documents that you got that back this up and how exactly you got them.

JEREMYSCAHILL: Well, I mean, first of all, what I mean by that is that the United States, throughout its history, has always engaged in assassination. But as a result of the global scandals of the—you know, involving the CIA, with the overthrow of—beginning with the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, the overthrow of Mosaddegh, the overthrow of Salvador Allende, and then the political assassinations that were taking place in the United States in the 1960s with JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, COINTELPRO—all of this sort of sparked, you know, congressional action, and there were committees formed to investigate this. And basically, the short version of the history is that President Gerald Ford issued an executive order that said that the United States would not conduct assassinations. And he used the term “political assassinations.” And, you know, people think, “Oh, well, the U.S. has a ban on assassination.” Every president since Ford, including Obama, has upheld that executive order that says that the U.S. doesn’t engage in assassinations. Jimmy Carter edited it at one point to take out the word “political” and to add, you know, contractors and other people working for the U.S. government.

But the U.S. Congress has stealthily avoided ever legislating the issue of assassination, because if it were to do so, it would call to question on one of the centerpieces of American doctrine around the world, that we can kill whomever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want, because—because we are America. And if Congress actually had to, say, define what an assassination was, which attempts to do that have just been clobbered by the permanent establishment, then you would have to look at things like the bombing—Reagan’s bombing of—an attempt to kill Gaddafi. You would have to look at the bombings that Bill Clinton did in the early stages of his presidency that were aimed at killing Saddam Hussein, but instead killed the famous Iraqi painter Layla Al-Attar and other civilians. You would have to look at the Obama administration’s targeting of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was never charged with a crime—and I think should have been charged with a crime and brought to justice, but instead he and another young American, Samir Khan, were executed by drone strike, authorized and ordered by the president of the United States. And so, if you’re going to say that that is not an assassination, then we live on a different planet. And so, the documents that we’ve obtained sort of show the banality of the immoral notion that we can kill people anywhere around the world without consequence and kill our way to victory.

*

Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald weigh in on comments from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her rival, Bernie Sanders, who have both supported the use of drones. Scahill notes that while Clinton is often portrayed as a more hawkish “cruise missile liberal,” Sanders also supported regime change in the 1990s. “Bernie Sanders signed onto neocon legislation that made the Iraq invasion possible by codifying into U.S. law that Saddam Hussein’s regime must be overthrown,” Scahill says, and “then supported the most brutal regime of economic sanctions in world history, that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.”

This is a rush transcript [by Democracy Now!]. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMYGOODMAN: Jeremy, I want to turn to Democratic presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Last year, Guardian columnist Owen Jones questioned her about the use of drone warfare.

OWENJONES: You’re a loving parent. What would you say to the loving parents of up to 202 children who have been killed by drones in Pakistan in a program which you escalated as secretary of state?

HILLARYCLINTON: Well, I would argue with the premise, because, clearly, the efforts that were made by the United States, in cooperation with our allies in Afghanistan and certainly with the Afghan government, to prevent the threat that was in Pakistan from crossing the border, killing Afghans, killing Americans, Brits and others, was aimed at targets that had been identified and were considered to be threats. The numbers about potential civilian casualties, I take with a somewhat big grain of salt, because there has been other studies which have proven there not to have been the number of civilian casualties.

AMYGOODMAN: And last October on NBC’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders about his position on drones.

CHUCKTODD: What does counterterrorism look like in a Sanders administration? Drones? Special forces? Or what does it look like?

SEN. BERNIESANDERS: Well, all of that and more.

CHUCKTODD: You would—you’re OK with the drone, using drones as—

SEN. BERNIESANDERS: Look, drone is a weapon. When it works badly, it is terrible and it is counterproductive. When you blow up a facility or a building which kills women and children—

CHUCKTODD: Sure.

SEN. BERNIESANDERS: —you know what? It not only doesn’t do us—it’s terrible.

CHUCKTODD: But you’re comfortable with the idea of using drones if you think you’ve isolated an important terrorist?

SEN. BERNIESANDERS: Well, yes, yes, yes.

CHUCKTODD: So, that continues in a Sanders administration.

SEN. BERNIESANDERS: Yes. And look, look, we all know, you know, that there are people, as of this moment, plotting against the United States. We have got to be vigorous in protecting our country, no question about it.

JEREMYSCAHILL: Well, I mean, you know, first of all, Hillary Clinton is one of the sort of legendary Democratic hawks in modern U.S. history. She’s—you know, she is what I like to call a cruise missile liberal, where—you know, they believe in launching missiles to solve problems and show they’re tough across the globe. Hillary Clinton, while she was secretary of state, really oversaw what amounted to a paramilitarization of some of the State Department’s divisions, and was the main employer of the private contractors that were working on behalf of the U.S. government, and was one of the key people in the horrid destruction that we’re now—in creating the horrid destruction that we’re now seeing in Libya, because of her embrace of regime change. But Hillary Clinton, on these issues, is sort of, you know, an easy target, because she is so open about her militaristic tendencies.

But Bernie Sanders, in a way, has been given a sort of pass on these issues. Recently at a Democratic town hall meeting, Bernie Sanders was asked directly about whether or not he supports the kill list. The actual term “the kill list” was used in an interview with him. And he said that the way that Obama is currently implementing it, he supports. You know, Bernie Sanders goes after Hillary Clinton all the time for being a regime change candidate—and he’s right—and blasting her for her alliance with people like Henry Kissinger. But let’s be clear: Bernie Sanders in the 1990s was a supporter and signed onto legislation that was authored by Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol and these notorious neocons, who created the disaster of the Iraq invasion with Democratic support. Bernie Sanders signed onto the key document that—the legislation that was created as a result of the Project for a New American Century, demanding that Bill Clinton make regime change in Iraq the law of the land. Bernie Sanders then voted for that bill, which, again, was largely authored by Donald Rumsfeld and the neocons. Bernie Sanders then supported the most brutal regime of economic sanctions in world history, that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. He supported the bombings in Iraq under President Clinton, under the guise of the so-called no-fly zones, the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam. Bernie Sanders was about regime change. Bernie Sanders signed onto neocon-led legislation that made the Iraq invasion possible by codifying into U.S. law that Saddam Hussein’s regime must be overthrown. So, when Bernie Sanders wants to hammer away at Hillary Clinton on this, go ahead. You are 100 percent right. She’s definitely the politics of empire right there. But Bernie Sanders needs to be asked about his embrace of regime change, because the policies that he supported in the 1990s were the precursor to the disastrous war in Iraq that he hammers on all the time without ever acknowledging his own role in supporting the legislation that laid the groundwork for it.

AMYGOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I’m going to give you the last word on this. You, too, have been writing about these candidates.

GLENNGREENWALD: It’s actually kind of amazing there’s nobody with a more adept skill at being able to just selectively concentrate on some things, while ignoring unpleasant things, than the Democratic partisan. I mean, Jeremy is right that Bernie Sanders has been given a pass, but that’s because Democrats have largely chosen to ignore foreign policy as part of the Democratic primary, because they simply don’t care. They only pretend to oppose wars when there’s a Republican in office and doing so can lead to partisan gain. So Hillary goes around the world vowing to get even closer to Netanyahu, to take our relationship with Israel to the next level, refuses even to talk about Palestinians like they’re human. She is responsible for one of the worst disasters of the last five or six years, which is the NATO intervention in Libya, and obviously supports President Obama’s bellicose policies and wants to escalate them. She criticizes him for not being aggressive enough. And yet Democrats just simply pretend none of that exists. They don’t care how many people outside the borders of the United States are killed by a Democratic president. And so Bernie has gotten a pass, unjustifiably, and hasn’t been asked about the things Jeremy described, because Democrats collectively—with some exceptions, but more or less generally—have decided to ignore all of the heinous things that Democrats do outside of the borders of the United States, because paying attention to them reflects so poorly on Hillary, and they just ignore things that reflect poorly on her.

AMYGOODMAN: And Donald Trump? Today, a key primary could determine whether he gets the nod to be the Republican candidate for president, in Indiana?

GLENNGREENWALD: Well, I mean, I just think it’s—in some sense, Washington, D.C.—not the United States, but Washington, D.C.—is getting exactly the election they deserve. These are the two most unpopular presidential candidates ever to run, I think, in 30 years. They have the highest unfavorable ratings of any nominees in decades. The only thing they’re able to do to one another is try and be as toxic and nasty and destructive as possible, because everybody has already decided, more or less, that they’re so unlikable. And so, it’s going to be the opposite of an inspiring election. It’s just going to be two extremely unpopular people trying to destroy the other on both a personal level, backed by huge amounts of money and serving more or less the same interests. And I think the two parties and the establishment leaders in Washington, and the people who support and run that whole system, have gotten exactly the election that they deserve. Unfortunately, Americans are going to have to suffer along with them.

AMYGOODMAN: We have to leave it there, and I want to thank you both for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, author with the staff of The Intercept of The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program. It’s out today.

And that does it for our broadcast. I’ll be speaking tonight in Atlanta at the First Iconium Baptist Church, 542 Moreland Avenue Southeast, then on to Washington state. Spokane, I’ll be speaking Wednesday night, Olympia Thursday, Seattle Friday, Mount Vernon Saturday, then Eugene and Portland, Oregon, on Sunday. Check democracynow.org.

Special thanks to Denis Moynihan, Mike Burke.

Learn more at DEMOCRACY NOW!

***

[1] Jeremy Scahill (born October 18, 1974) is a founding editor of the online news publication The Intercept and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (now Academi), which won the George Polk Book Award. His book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield was published by Nation Books on April 23, 2013. On June 8, 2013, the documentary film of the same name, produced, narrated and co-written by Scahill, was released. It premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

Jeremy Scahill Remembers His Longtime Friend, Father Daniel Berrigan: “The Man was a Moral Giant”; “The Assassination Complex”: Jeremy Scahill & Glenn Greenwald Probe Secret US Drone Wars in New Book; “This Isn’t a War on Leaks, It’s a War on Whistleblowers”: Snowden Pens Foreword to New Scahill Book; Jeremy Scahill: Clinton is Legendary Hawk, But Sanders Shouldn’t Get Pass on Role in Regime Change.

Democracy Now! has also grown into a syndicated TV show. View the video archive here.

LUMPENPROLETARIAT—GONZO: I’ve been listening to news and information since I was a child growing up in San Mateo, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. I remember being kind of fond, as a kid, of the SF Bay Area’s Ten O’clock News on TV Channel 2 (KTVU), even after they were taken over by the conservative Fox. Seeing Dennis Richmond, as a news anchor along with his colleagues, on a regular basis led me to trust their newscasts. Eventually, I came to decide that, for me, the most appropriate (and honest) local outlet of news and information was free speech Pacifica Radio Network, particularly free speech radio KPFA (Berkeley, CA), and including Democracy Now!, which I’ve been listening to since it began broadcasting across Pacifica Radio’s national network out of the New York City-based, WBAI. Democracy Now! even went on to grow into one of the most important progressive TV shows.

I’ve been involved in and around KPFA over the years and have many friends (and, probably, enemies) in the KPFA community. But I’ll save those experiences for another time. I will say that I even ran for KPFA’s governing body, the KPFA Local Station Board (LSB) in 2010, alongside Dr. Sureya Sayadi and long-time SF Bay Area labor journalist Steve Zeltzer, who currently hosts the labour programme, WorkWeek, at KPFA.

I only hope to convey my passion for critical free speech and the free flow of information on the eve of free speech radio KPFA’s 67th Birthday. All of my most thoughtful teachers, since childhood, and professors in community college and the University of Missouri-Kansas City, have confirmed the importance of being an informed and critical citizen to further the best hopes for a functioning and healthy democracy.

This is why I have always approached news and information with a very serious earnestness, taking notes and such. However, it’s a shame that I’ve not been able to organise all of my notes very well and have lost many of the important news and information across various moves over many years. (Some of my notes have been documented at MediaRoots.org. And some of my KPFA transcripts of Guns and Butter broadcasts of heterodox economist Dr. Michael Hudson (UMKC) have been published in Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents (2012) by Dr. Michael Hudson. So, the efforts of those of us to document important broadcasts have not been in vain.)

It’s always been disappointing to me (and others around the KPFA community, such as independent journalist and expert on geopolitics in the African Continent, Ann Garrison) that, as many of us have discussed, KPFA has failed to make individual segments and news stories accessible to listeners, scholars, and researchers. Basically, tons of important information comes and goes like disposable entertainment. Many of the broadcast archives are not even labelled with the topics discussed nor time stamps given for how to find individual segments within broadcasts.

For some reason, despite its abundance of willing and able volunteers, KPFA has never been able to consistently archive, transcribe, document and make accessible its many important broadcasts (outside of the wealthier listeners who can afford to make larger donations and be rewarded with archival content). Worse, many broadcasts are often deleted after a certain period of time under the pretext that when songs are used in radio broadcasts, then those broadcasts must be deleted from the archives, such that the working classes, the proletariat, and the lumpenproletariat are deprived of beneficial information capable of helping facilitate informed decision-making. (Instead of editing out any songs and/or copyrighted material to be able to archive free speech radio broadcasts, the entire broadcasts are deleted from KPFA’s archive web pages.)

All of this, of course, runs counter to Pacifica’s noble mission statement, which certain factions within KPFA oppose. Not everybody within KPFA fully supports free speech nor KPFA’s and Pacifica Radio’s democratic governance structure by which listeners elect board members to run KPFA and the other Pacifica stations across the nation. Effectively, the listener-sponsors are the owners of free speech radio KPFA and its off-shoot, the Pacifica Radio Network. KPFA, the nation’s (and probably the world’s) first listener sponsored radio station serves as a model for the world to see how the airwaves belong to the people. Radio dials around the world (and TV bandwidth) do not need to be run and controlled for and by corporate interests, as KPFA has nobly exemplified for 67 years. The people deserve (and need) at least 50% of the radio dial to be publicly run and operated in the interest of the people, not corporate advertisers, establishment propagandists, or capitalist profiteers.

The democratic governance structure at KPFA and across its national Pacifica Radio Network was borne of the great struggle of many thousands of us who rallied to support KPFA and Pacifica Radio in 1999 when armed thugs occupied KPFA radio, under then-Pacifica Radio Executive Director Lynn Chadwick and then-Pacifica Radio Chair Mary Frances Berry. The straw that broke the camel’s back that fateful evening in 1999 came when Chadwick and Berry tried to censor broadcasters and Flashpoints executive producer and host Dennis Bernstein was physically dragged out of the radio station in mid-broadcast. That was a chilling broadcast, which cast a very real sense of fascism in America.

Flashpoints was taken off the air and KPFA’s programming was replaced by some weird canned programming piped in from out of state. I was working in San Carlos, California, that evening, listening to KPFA radio as usual. But I immediately drove across the SF Bay straight to Berkeley when I heard Dennis Bernstein, one of my favourite broadcasters, being dragged away from the KPFA microphones. By the time I arrived, less than an hour later, there were loads of people outside of the radio station, who had surrounded KPFA in solidarity. The waged and unwaged staff had been taken off the air and the building was soon locked, the doors chained up, and the windows boarded up. It seemed like free speech radio might be killed off forever and we’d soon be on our way to an Orwellian brave new world.

But, we the people, refused to give up free speech radio, even camping out in front of the station for weeks. President Bill Clinton even sent Janet Reno when the establishment felt the Berkeley police were being too lenient with KPFA supporters camped out in front of the KPFA building on Martin Luther King, Jr. Way in Berkeley, California.

These notes (as I run out of time today), aim to speak to why Lumpenproletariat.org (like many of my friends as well) has worked to document many broadcasts, making them more visible around the world online, which are important to enlighten and expand listener consciousness, but which are often deleted and/or obfuscated over time. The goal is to combat collective amnesia, which prevents us from learning from past mistakes and leads progressives to repeatedly be fooled by the two-party dictatorship, such as the unfortunate support that certain factions within KPFA gave to the Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012, despite the wealth of information broadcast on KPFA and Pacifica Radio, which one would think would preclude anyone around KPFA from voting for an Obama, as it would be a vote against one’s own interests as a member of America’s working class. I’ll never forget how frustrating it was to hear intellectuals, such as Chris Hedges support Obama’s campaign for U.S. president in 2008, and hearing the giddy voices of people, such as KPFA’s Brian Edwards-Tiekert and others gleefully supporting Obama. Like the song by The Who, we hope we don’t get fooled again.

In closing, I apologise for any editorial sloppiness or wordiness. All of the above is to introduce my personal broadcast notes to Lumpenproletariat, not unlike my university lecture notes. I started keeping notes this month on a private web page for my own personal reference. But I’ve decided to make these notes publicly visible, in the hope that these notes may help fill the gaps left by KPFA’s website, an issue which I championed, alongside Steve Zeltzer and our Voices For Justice slate, when we ran for the KPFA Local Station Board back in 2010.

2nd topic: Professor Mehrsa Baradaran, author of How the Other Half Banks on predatory banking, such as payday loans and such; the failures of credit unions

***

Tuesday, 12 APR 2016

La Raza Chronicles

Listened to: none

“Tonight’s program includes a commentary on the international response to the murder of the Honduran indigenous environmental activist, Berta Caseres; an interview about the fightback against immigration raids; the story of a Federico Correa’s journey from a California fieldworker to a Mexican artist with an exhibit at Bellas Artes in San Miquel de Allende, Mexico; a calendar of upcoming events; y mucha musica! Enjoy!”

***

Thursday, 14 APR 2016

UpFront (hosted by Brian Edwards-Tiekert), 07:00 PDT

Listened to: min30 to end

topic: Brazil(?)

next topic: (c. 31:00) author discusses her book about so-called “puppy mills” or dog breeding industry

*

Rising Up with Sonali, 08:00 PDT

Listened to: 1st 47 min

Intro by Sonali: Drug Prohibition and so-called War On Drugs

News Headlines (read by Alfandary-clone, Christina Anistad(sp?)

1st topic: UN role in the so-called War On Drugs

Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream (JAN 2015), a book on the so-called War On Drugs

UNGAS? (UN General Assembly on Drugs)

the rights of addicts; decriminalising drug use

(c. 26:00) end of segment; brief crappy music break (stock music sample)

2nd topic: Ana Teresa Fernandez(sp?), artist is painting sections of the US-Mexico border wall, so as to make it look as if it has disappeared (cf. Banksy painting of an opening in a Palestinian wall)

(c. 34:00) Sonali mentions the Banksy work delicately, apparently, so as not to accuse her of ripping off his concept

(c. 19:00) Sonali Kolhatkar pitching and selling Studs Terkel speech, entitled Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times from KPFA Allies Pack: 2015-2016(?), “consisting of 180 recordings” (BET said later when he joined in)

school districts with rocket launchers (mentioned during intro, but I didn’t see it in the DN website)

(c. 20:00) to (c. 25:00), AG mentions that JG got to ask Hillary Clinton about Berta Caseres, but they didn’t air it yet (and I didn’t hear it during the broadcast; maybe it was cut out when AG and KPFA cut away to documentary, KPFA On the Air)

on the Palestinian question: Bernie Sanders does well, HC sounds like a bully braking about ‘Hamas being aided by some nation or other) ‘maybe Syria)

(c. 28:00) AG seems to cut away from regular broadcast to play an excerpt of KPFA on the air (narrated by Alice Walker. Sunday evening at 7pm, AG will be in the SF Bay Area

Matthew Lasar clip

vintage news clip

(c. 37:00) Elsa Knight Thompson

(c. 38:00) [superTW] clip from Elsa Knight Thompson

radicals, such as Black Panthers symbolise the first split within KPFA. Street activists wanted their voices on the air. Elsa Knight Thompson didn’t, apparently. This internal division seems to have continued to this day.

(c. 40:00) Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley

‘Pacifica was one of the first news outlets to question US involvement in the Vietnam War’

[TW] On the interconnectedness of the global economy [notes: Perhaps, it’s easy to ignore the poor in our town or city limits, or those in other states, or those in other nations. But Dr. Wolff explains clearly how we’re interconnected on a global scale. Since the GFC originated in the USA, as a result of our political decisions and actions or inactions, we have a very real responsibility to inform ourselves and own the consequences of political decisions made in our name.]

(c. 8:00) Panama papers

(c. 21:00) Mitch Jeserich cuts in to appeal for listener support

(c. 25:00) Dr. Richard Wolff ‘pulls over’ to get on the phone and help pitch

(c. 32:00) On the economics of the (blue collar) Crime Bill signed by Bill Clinton, et al.; facing economic hardship, classes (or “layers” of people) could have banded together; some turned to criminal activity; USA incarcerates at the highest rate in the world;

(c. 40:00) Mitch Jeserich cuts in to appeal for listener support

(c. 44:00) back to Economic Update: Dr. Wolff resumes discussing incarceration rates associated with ‘economic downturns’; “the sugar baby phenomenon”…”young college students” having difficulty getting through college payments, so some young people are having trouble and enter into a “sugar baby” relationship. This is agreeing to be a “companion” to a wealthy person who pays for college expenses.

(c. 49:00) Mitch Jeserich cuts in to appeal for listener support

(c. 51:00) back to Economic Update: Dr. Wolff discusses worker co-operatives or workers self-directed enterprises; co-ops in other nations, such as Cuba

Mitch Jeserich and Sasha Lilley discuss KPFA event, a debate between Chris Hedges and Christopher Hitchens on religion. (I’ll never forget this. I was rooting for Christopher Hitchens.)

SL: “both identified as socialists”

MJ: “wasn’t Christopher Hitchens drinking” throughout this event? Yes, his coffee was spiked

(c. 5:00) Christopher Hitchens is aired first. (I can’t recall if CH went first or not.)

(c. 17:00) Mitch Jeserich cuts in to appeal for listener support

(c. 21:00) Sasha Lilley joins MJ to appeal for listener support and discuss the debate between Hitchens and Hedges

(c. 24:00) Chris Hedges responds to Christopher Hitchens’ critique of religion, opening with the charge that Hitchens conflates religion with tribalism. Hedges cites Tillich, King, et al., and their moral analyses. We’ll have to re-listen to this because, at this point, it seems the two are debating apples and oranges. Hedges opened with his disdain for religious fundamentalism, which is certainly something Hitchens opposes. But, then, Hedges moved to cite famous moral leaders who were (or are) religious. But, if memory serves me, Hitchens was opposing organised religion. Indeed, consider the interview which Project Censored broadcast on 25 DEC 2015 with a respected theologian Matthew Fox, who was censored by the Vatican for questioning religious dogma. The same theologian corroborates Hitchens charges against religious leaders, such as the charge that Opus Dei leaders are “card-carrying” fascists. (About the evils of the Opus Dei, also see the Guns and Butter broadcasts from 2012, which covered across seven hours of broadcasting over seven weeks, the MMT Summit in Rimini, Italy. (MMT stands for Modern Money Theory, or Modern Monetary Theory, which I studied, whilst earning a degree in Economics from the heterodox economics department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, UMKC.) I was so impressed with MMT, that I went to UMKC to study MMT and heterodox economics. Two of the most impressive speakers at the MMT Summit in Rimini, Italy would later become two of the professors I enrolled in classes with at UMKC—Dr. Stephanie Kelton (Intermediate Macroeconomic Analysis) and Dr. William K. Black (Law and Economics). During one of those broadcasts, Dr. Alain Parguez gives first-hand accounts of the Opus Dei’s role in the drafting of the odious Treaty of Maastricht, which brought the Eurozone together under the Euro, but under terms, which would benefit the European center, especially Germany, at the expense of the periphery, at the expense of what reactionaries call the P.I.I.G.S., Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain.

(c. 33:00) Sasha Lilley cuts in to appeal for listener support

(c. 39:00) back to the debate:

Chris Hedges continues his sermon

(c. 45:00) Christopher Hitchens responds to Chris Hedges’ retort

(c. 49:00) Chris Hedges responds to Christopher Hitchens, arguing that despots will always wrap themselves in the cloak of something or other, such as the cloak of religion. “The problem is not religion. The problem is the human heart,” argues Chris Hedges.

(c. 14:00) Tracy Rosenberg [not identified, but she’s a personal acquaintance, so I recognise her voice]

(c.15:00) Free Radio Berkeley broadcaster

(c. 16:00)

(c. 23:00) Dr. Peter Phillips appeals for listener support and offers the “KPFA History Pack” and the “KPFA Allies Pack”, which features all of the feature speaker events broadcast on KPFA during the last 15 years. Dennis Bernstein joins in appealing for listener support, noting that he was born in the same year KPFA was born.

(c. 29:00) Dr. Peter Phillips goes through a timeline of historical highlights in the history of KPFA, including its birth on 15 APR 1949.

Dennis Bernstein notes that even KPFA/Pacifica founder Lew Hill was kicked off KPFA’s board, as an example of the internal challenges, which have confronted free speech radio KPFA.

(c. 31:00) Audio clip from Camp KPFA circa 1999.

Unidentified

Free Radio Berkeley broadcaster mentions how homeless people came to support KPFA, including creating a “chain gang” of people who chained themselves to the radio station in solidarity

(c. 33:00) Tracy Rosenberg

(c. 48:00) Another audio clip from Remembering Camp KPFA

(c. 51:00) Tracy Rosenberg

(c. 53:00) Back to Dr. Peter Phillips and Dennis Berstein on-air appeals for listener support

(c. 7:00) [TW] On Lewis Hill and KPFA’s beginnings, and the later birth of the Pacifica Radio Network.

(c. 10:00) [TW] Audio of Weyland Southon, one of the founders of Hard Knock Radio (audio from “65 Voices Collection” 7-CD set)

(c. 12:00) [TW] Spoken word (a capella of a Coup song, which I remember, but the name of the song escapes me at the moment) by Boots Riley (of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club. If my brother RDM were here, he’d know the name.)

(c. 52:00) Back to Anita Johnson, who mentions that June Jordan came into prominence at a time when female voices were just starting to overcome patriarchal repression. June Jordan, notes Anita Johnson, died June 14, 2002 at her home in Berkeley, California.

(c. 54:00) Anita Johnson mentions that, although she appreciates Amy Goodman, there was a time when Hard Knock Radio was not fully embraced by Pacifica Radio’s old guard. [Indeed, many of us remember that all too well.]

Intro by Dennis Bernstein: “Today on Flashpoints, we celebrate the 67th Anniversary, remembering the 1996 church bombings in Alabama, when Trump foreign policy adviser, was a racist Attorney General in Alabama named Jefferson Sessions. Name sound familiar? And we’ll explore the roots of our own Miguel ‘Gavilan’ Molina. I’m Dennis Bernstein. All this, straight ahead on Flashpoints. Stay tuned.” (c. 1:00)

Opening remarks from Dennis Bernstein and Miguel ‘El Gavilan’ Molina

Audio from a 1996 investigative report by Dennis Bernstein, interviewed by Amy Goodman, and broadcast on Democracy Now!. The audio archive of the reporting by Amy Goodman, includes audio from a radio documentary produced by Dennis Bernstein (with Ron Nixon, who is now with the New York Times) investigating the 1996 church bombings in Alabama as well as the racist policies .

(c. 21:37) Back to Dennis Bernstein in studio at KPFA (in the present day)

[TW] Commentary by Dennis Bernstein on the racism of then-Attorney General of Alabama Jefferson Sessions. Sessions has been selected by Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump to serve as his foreign policy adviser.

(c. 24:15) [TW] Miguel ‘El Gavilan’ Molina enters the conversation and is asked by Dennis Bernstein to describe his “roots”, as a migrant farmworker in California. Gavilan discusses his introduction to radio as a teenager, including working with former KPFA veteran Jim Bennett, covering MECHA student activism, which “radicalised” him and, eventually, led him to KPFA, covering the Chicano lowrider subculture. Gavilan described constantly being racially profiled whilst cruising with his lowrider comrades, leading to the inception of the 36-year old Friday night lowrider show, La Onda Bajita.

(c. 41:15) Dennis Bernstein transitions to appeals for listener support for free speech radio KPFA. Bernstein mentions the fact that Flashpoints began broadcasting in 1990.

(c. 57:00) Dennis Bernstein gets a bit autobiographical.

*

Full Circle

Listened to: first 32 (of 60) minutes

“It’s a full hour of musica Latina.” Featured artist is Razteria (aka Renée Asteria, former KPFA worker).

(c. 13:25) Interview with Renée Asteria aka Razteria.

Renée Asteria plays a song live, singing in English, Spanish, and French

Renée Asteria mentioned that she grew up in France, even though she’s “not French at all, and cites Aterciopelados and Nina Simone as influences. Renée Asteria announced that she’ll be playing at a Bernie Sanders benefit at El Rio on June 4, 2016 with further details to be announced.

Kevin Pina hosted a “freewheelin'” discussion on the commodification of democracy

First guest (on the telephone): Kai Newkirk, “Campaign Director of Democracy Spring“, also co-founder and organiser of 99 Rise

Kevin Pina says: ‘It seems no matter who we vote for, nothing changes.’ [But, unfortunately, what this brilliant scholar and educator doesn’t point out is that we have a two-party dictatorship, as Ralph Nader has dubbed it.]

It’s reported that over 900 people have been arrested so far, as scores of activsts have converged in Washington, D.C. to demand electoral reform.

Kevin Pina’s guest mentions proportional representation in congressional elections, which is good. Unfortunately, nobody mentions ranked-choice voting, particularly in the context of presidential elections. One understands his frustration, but the problem seems to be that activist groups do not magnify the more meaningful electoral reforms, such as ranked choice voting and opening the presidential debates to more than the top two political parties.

Pina is currently producer/director at Long Memory Productions, a media consultant for several projects and a Broadcast Lecturer for the Department of Communication at California State University East Bay (CSUEB) in Hayward, CA.

Pina is also a Senior Producer for the program Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio and is a frequent guest host for other programs on KPFA 94.1 FM in Berkeley, CA. He is the founding editor of the Haiti Information Project (HIP), an independent news source in Haiti, and serves as a Country Expert on Haiti for the Varieties of Democracy project sponsored by the University of Notre Dame and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

LUMPENPROLETARIAT—One often wonders whether or not Democracy Now!‘s editorial stance is critical enough, that is to say honest enough, of the Obama Administration. Amy Goodman, for example, during today’s broadcast spoke of Obama in glowing and sweeping terms. Obama is pictured in heroic terms with regard to the “permanent security state” Obama is said to be resisting. Yet, Obama has perpetuated or worsened many of the worst policies from the previous administration under Bush. For example, Obama has increased the use of drone strikes on foreign soil, leaving a destructive trail of collateral damage.

It’d be nice, if the editors behind Democracy Now! would be transparent about their political stripes and just say that they’re Democrats and support voting Democrat. So, they may never be as critical of Obama as others, simply by definition. Nevertheless, Democracy Now! is, perhaps, the best English-language daily news broadcast around.

Messina

***

DEMOCRACY NOW!—[4 NOV 2015] In the largest one-time release of federal prisoners in U.S. history, more than 6,000 inmates have been freed early under a resentencing effort for people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. Decisions by the U.S. Sentencing Commission last year reduced prison terms for certain drug offenses and applied those changes retroactively. Most have been released to halfway houses and home confinement, while close to one-third—about 1,700 people—are undocumented immigrants who now face immediate deportation. The release comes as President Obama has announced a series of steps to help former prisoners readjust to society, including “banning the box”—barring federal agencies from asking potential employees about their criminal records on job applications. We discuss the Obama administration’s steps and the societal challenges for newly freed prisoners with three guests: Susan Burton, founder and executive director of A New Way of Life Reentry Project, which provides support to former prisoners after their release; Five Mualimm-ak, a former prisoner and founder of Incarcerated Nation Collective, a collective of previously incarcerated people; Victoria Law, a freelance journalist, former prisoner and author of “Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the largest one-time release of federal prisoners in U.S. history. More than 6,000 inmates have been freed early under a resentencing effort for people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. Decisions by the U.S. Sentencing Commission last year reduced prison terms for certain drug offenses and applied those changes retroactively. The move came as part of an effort to ease prison overcrowding fueled by the harsh crime laws of the 1980s and 1990s. Prisoners eligible under the new guidelines were allowed to apply before a federal judge. The federal government began releasing those who were approved on Friday. Most of the prisoners have not been let go entirely—the majority are living in halfway houses or under home confinement. Close to one-third—about 1,700 people—are undocumented immigrants who now face immediate deportation.

AMYGOODMAN: More releases are expected in the coming months, with more than 40,000 federal drug prisoners eligible to apply. But even a record-breaking one-time release will barely make a dent in the U.S. mass incarceration crisis. With 2.3 million people behind bars, the U.S. jails nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners, despite having less than 5 percent of the world’s population. Sixty percent of U.S. prisoners are people of color. A bipartisan criminal justice reform bill recently introduced in the Senate would shorten mandatory minimums for drug crimes, but advocates want the minimums abolished entirely.

On Monday, the final day of the early releases, President Obama unveiled an effort to help the formerly incarcerated. Speaking in Newark, New Jersey, President Obama announced he’s “banning the box”—barring federal agencies from asking potential employees about their criminal records on job applications.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: The federal government, I believe, should not use criminal history to screen out applicants before we even look at their qualifications. We can’t dismiss people out of hand simply because of a mistake that they made in the past.

AMYGOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by three guests. We’re joined by Susan Burton. Susan Burton is joining us from San Francisco, founder and executive director of A New Way of Life Reentry Project.

And joining us here in New York, Victoria Law, freelance journalist, author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. Her most recent article for Truthout is headlined “After Spending Years in Prison, 2,000 Federal Drug War Prisoners Will Face Deportation.”

And we’re also joined here in New York by Five Mualimm-ak, a human rights and prison reform advocate, founder of Incarcerated Nation Collective, a collective of previously incarcerated people. He spent 11 years, nearly, in New York’s prison system.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Victoria, let’s begin with you. Just lay out what’s taken place, the historic release, but barely making a dent in the U.S. prison population.

VICTORIALAW: When we look at this historic release, we have to understand that, as you said earlier, with 2.3 million people behind bars, 6,000 barely makes a dent. And the push has been—the safe push, political push, has been to look at people who are convicted of nonviolent drug offenses, which then leaves out huge categories of people who perhaps have violence in their criminal record. And violence doesn’t necessarily mean egregious violence. It might even just mean I’ve done something to you, which may or may not have a—may or may not have a lasting physical impact, but because it’s done onto a person, it’s considered violent. It also leaves a lot of room for the prosecutor to be able to charge—overcharge people to be able to get them to plead guilty. And what we’ve seen with this 6,000 is, again, if we’re not looking at everybody who’s in prison and we’re only looking at a certain segment of the population, we’re not going to be making any inroads into reducing mass incarceration.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But even with these numbers, as we noted, about a third of those being released are going to be deported.

VICTORIALAW: Yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about that? Have those folks already been deported or are in the process now?

VICTORIALAW: So, people are in the process of being deported. So, approximately 2,000 people are foreign-born, so—which means that because they did not have the luck of being born on U.S. soil, or their parents were not able to apply for citizenship for them, they—unlike everybody who supposedly is getting a second chance, the 4,000 U.S.-born federal drug war prisoners—don’t get that second chance. So what happens is they are technically discharged from the federal prison system. They don’t get to walk out the gates to their family or their friends, or even get on a bus and go home and see their children. They are instead picked up by ICE and taken to an immigration detention facility, where they await deportation.

And we see that there’s a twisting, a merger of the criminal justice system and the immigration system dating back to 1996, when Clinton passed the [Antiterrorism and] Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and [Immigrant] Responsibility Act, both of which are mouthfuls, which basically expanded the list of criminal offenses which would subject people to detention and deportation. So, something like a drug crime, which mandates one year in prison, now makes somebody eligible for deportation, whereas in the past it was five years. So—

AMYGOODMAN: So there’s a difference between an undocumented person and a, quote, “foreign citizen”?

VICTORIALAW: Yes, so even if you have legal permanent residency, you’re still subject to deportation, because—

AMYGOODMAN: Can you appeal this?

VICTORIALAW: You can, and I am not a lawyer, so I don’t want to comment on how likely it is, but you go before an immigration judge, and the judge has to decide what is and is not possible. But also, if you are perhaps not well versed in the law, not well versed in English, you might have a harder time understanding the process and also knowing what your rights are.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’d like to ask Five Mualimm-ak, your response to this mass release, even though it is such a tiny portion of the total prison population?

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: Yes. I think that, first of all, you said it and framed it in the right way, that this is a first step in the right direction, but it is a small dent. I would also like to see more previously incarcerated individual organizations who do re-entry being supported, as well. Yes, we do know that this money and this funding will go to organizations who have a résumé of paying more for salaries than they are for services. So I would like to see the—even though we are a part of that—you know, you have Daryl Atkinson, who is a part of the re-entry formation of these projects. But let’s just see those incarcerated also have an input involved in the re-entry of those coming home.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about this re-entry issue? You went through it yourself.

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: Yes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And clearly, the president this week attempted to address that issue by ordering at least federal agencies to ban the box.

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: Right. Banning the box will, of course, assist those who are returning citizens to be able to find fair employment. Those things are what he’s supposed to do. These are talking about returning citizens who are returning to our community and should be treated like community members, as well. But we’re not talking about full restoration of disenfranchisement. You know, felony disenfranchisement started here in New York state, sad to say. And it’s still a big part of this. Banning the box for higher education—how are we going to teach people to grow without any change, right? We need to have that. I think that that is a small step forward, but a great step in the right direction. We need to see—

AMYGOODMAN: What about—

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: —reforms like this.

AMYGOODMAN: What about housing?

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: Housing is one of the bigger issues, right? And that bill you see today leaves it up to HUD to actually come up with recommendations. Now, this is an organization that has historically banned people previously incarcerated and have difficulties. In New York state, you have chronic homelessness, which doesn’t include incarceration. So if you spent 15 years in a state penitentiary, you come home, you’re considered homeless one day. I lived two blocks from here, right at BRC, for two years, where they couldn’t place me because I’m a felon. And they created special housing for that. That’s what we need. We need housing catered to helping those re-enter society, and help them, assisting them into the community, you know?

AMYGOODMAN: Does banning the box apply to housing?

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: No, it doesn’t. The allows for HUD to come up with their own regulations and suggestions for dealing with arrests and how people are banned from housing. And they haven’t been too progressive in the past.

AMYGOODMAN: Section 8 housing?

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: Yes. I have Section 8 housing. I’m one of the only felons in the project who does. And these type of special projects are small. It’s 26 apartment units in my building. And it needs to be changed. And this is why we will be doing other—INC itself will be moving forward to address the issue of re-entry and show America what re-entry really looks like.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in previous public housing policies, at least here in New York, I know that if—even if you had a convicted felon in your family—

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: Yes, exactly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —you had a problem with being able to stay in public housing.

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: Yeah, you’re not allowed on federal property. You can’t be on government property, no city property. You can’t get a FHA first-time homebuyers’ loan, nothing. So this leaves thousands of people. We have 600,000, over half a million people, returning citizens from state and federal facilities per year. We need to provide for them and think about where are these people going to live. Are they going to live in three-quarter housing, that’s going to feed the privatization and exploitation of people constantly? Or are we going to provide comprehensive services with honest housing, that people can house their family with, as well?

AMYGOODMAN: Susan Burton, you’re joining us from Los Angeles. You are part of A New Way of Life Reentry Project.

SUSANBURTON: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about your own story and what you found were the greatest difficulties to re-enter society after you were imprisoned.

SUSANBURTON: So, my five-year-old son was killed by a LAPD detective. After that, I used drugs, used alcohol, and was incarcerated. And for the next 15 years, I was in a cycle in and out of prisons, and, leaving prisons, not able to access any help.

In 1997, someone helped me, and I was able to get my life on track. Someone helped me in a higher-income area of Santa Monica, California. And what I found there is people in that community were able to access so many different types of services. And I’m from South L.A., and I couldn’t understand why there was such a buffet of services in Santa Monica and actually none in South L.A., where it was so badly needed.

So I returned, after getting help with my grief and with my addiction, to South L.A. and got a little, small bungalow and began to welcome women leaving prison into that bungalow. So, today, we have over—we’ve helped over 850 women return back from prisons and jails. But the discrimination and the systemic barriers are just a lot to actually have to work through—too much to have to work through. Once you have served your prison sentence, you should not be—we should not be excluding people from basic living needs and services, such as housing, such as jobs, such as family reunification.

So, you know, I wanted to go to school. I was banned from getting aid back in 1998 when I tried to get into a nursing school. They told me I would never be able to be a healthcare provider. And coming back into the community, you want to be able to be an asset, a viable asset to your community.

And what is also so striking to me is that we spend hundreds of thousands a year on a person just warehousing and incarcerating them. In California, it runs out about $67,000 a year, depending on how healthy you are, up into the hundreds of thousands. And when you get back to the community, you can’t get any types of supports or services. It just doesn’t make sense to us—to me. And, you know, my thought is: What are we doing here? Women are the largest-growing segment of the prison system, and California houses the biggest women’s prison in the world. And my thought is: What are we doing here?

And, you know, I agree with the other speakers today: This release is only a start. And we have people who have been prosecuted so many different types of ways to say that they’re violent. And, you know, I believe in rehabilitation, not only for drug addiction, but for other areas. And we cannot continue to warehouse people and not provide levels of rehabilitation, re-entry services, training, jobs, and allow them to be an asset and add to this economy in America.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to bring Victoria Law back into this discussion. There was a recent New York Times article talking about the heroin epidemic in various communities around the United States and how suddenly there was this gentler approach to dealing with drug addiction. But what they didn’t say, these are largely white communities, compared to how the government was dealing a few decades ago with the mandatory sentences for drug convictions that mostly affected black and brown communities.

VICTORIALAW: Yes. I mean, so what we’re seeing now is that we’re talking about having a kinder, gentler, more merciful, second-chance approach, because we’re seeing it—we’re seeing white, middle-class, more affluent communities being affected—which is not to say that there weren’t drug addiction problems and substance abuse problems in those communities before. But now we’re seeing this come to the forefront, and people are saying, “I don’t want my child locked up. You know, my child is a good child. So he or she should get a second chance.” Whereas these same people might have looked at this issue 10 years ago and said, “Well, I think this person is a criminal based on all these racist stereotypes I’ve been fed from day one, since I, you know, was learning how to read, write and imbibe media.”

AMYGOODMAN: Before we wrap up, Five, your first day out of prison, describe what happened.

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: Dropped off at 42nd Street, Times Square. Spider-Man’s fighting the Statue of Liberty. I’m navigating through that, have to make it to parole. Majority of people don’t make it past that point.

AMYGOODMAN: How much money do you have in your pocket?

FIVEMUALIMM-AK: I have $40 and a bus ticket receipt, right? This is what they give you when you’re released. Thousands of people, roughly 2,000 people, per year is released directly from solitary confinement, like myself, right into the bus station. I had a panic attack that time, ended up going to the hospital that day. Majority of people then have to go from parole, and the majority then are shipped off to Wards Island, where we’re isolating for people previously incarcerated and moving them over to another entire island. And then, from there, I went to Bellevue, and then, from there, to BRC, because of my mental illness. But that was after spending months of cycling in and out of Bellevue, because it’s just an overnight shelter. So that means you’re there for the night, and you have to take everything that you own and make it through the day and find somewhere or whatever you have to do for your appointments.

And this is how it’s unnavigated, unsupported, and we are hopelessly in this country and unequivocally financially addicted to caging our citizens. So we’re going to face this problem every day. And we have—like I said, we over half a million returning citizens. How are we addressing that? You have organizations like INC, myself, JustLeadership, Center for New Leadership, as well, who address these issues from a population directly impacted. Are they being supported? No. We’re one of the most unsupported organizations and underfunded businesses there, because funders don’t direct—don’t fund organizations who do direct service. The catch-22 is that people previously incarcerated are exempt from direct services.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we will continue to follow this story, of course. Five Mualimm-ak is the founder of Incarcerated Nation Collective. Victoria Law, we will link to your articles. And thank you very much to Susan Burton, who founded and heads A New Way of Life Reentry Project, speaking to us from Los Angeles.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency. We’ll speak with the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Charlie Savage. Stay with us.